2021
August
09
Monday

Monitor Daily Podcast

August 09, 2021
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Over the weekend, I heard someone express appreciation for a conversation that pushed her thought in new directions. The phrasing caught my attention because it’s something we talk a lot about at the Monitor: identifying important shifts in thinking on key issues, and exploring what’s driving them.

Nick Roll addresses one such shift in his story today about Western museums whose African collections raise questions about a colonial legacy of looted artwork. Long-accepted practices are being challenged – donations or purchases where paperwork is thin, silence amid troubling possibilities, disinterest in working with countries of origin. Moving to the center is a question posed in our story two years ago about the Benin Bronzes: “Who should be the caretaker of Africa’s cultural heritage – the Africans who created it, or the Europeans in whose museums it has long been displayed?” 

The issue resonates broadly. Last week, a plane landed in Baghdad carrying 17,000 artifacts, the largest ever repatriation of antiquities to a country where looting spiked amid war. The items came from the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., and Cornell University. The U.S. Justice Department played a key role with fines and pressure, and reforms are underway.

What’s shifted is an appreciation for what lies behind a physical artwork. “This is … about the Iraqi people,” said Iraq’s minister of culture. “It restores not just the tablets, but the confidence of the Iraqi people by enhancing and supporting the Iraqi identity in these difficult times.”


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

Karen Norris/Staff
University of Michigan Museum of Art, Anonymous Gift, 1985/1.187
This Bembe reliquary will go on display at the University of Michigan Museum of Art in late August. Researchers are trying to assess its provenance.
Doug Struck
Fourth-generation rancher Wayne Mrnak strides into a field to check the water supply for his cattle in Bowman, North Dakota, July 21, 2021. His great-grandfather homesteaded the land in 1906, and Mr. Mrnak's children and grandchildren now live on the ranch.
Mike Blake/Reuters
Samuel Mikulak of the United States hugs Artur Dalaloyan of the Russian Olympic Committee after competing on the vault at the Summer Olympics in Tokyo on July 26, 2021. The Russian team went on to win gold, while the Americans took fifth place.

The Monitor's View

AP
Afghans who fled their home due to fighting between the Taliban and Afghan security forces gather at a park in Kabul, Aug. 9.

A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

A message of love

Dar Yasin/AP
Kashmiri men sell their produce at the floating vegetable market on the Dal Lake in Srinagar, Indian-administered Kashmir, Aug. 7, 2021. The market is one of the major sources of income for the lake dwellers, who spend years carefully nurturing their floating gardens with the rich soil extracted from the lake bed.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Karen Norris. )

A look ahead

Thanks for starting your week with us. Tomorrow, I hope you’ll check out Jacqueline Adams’ talk with Alvin Hall, whose podcast “Driving the Green Book” won an award for the best history podcast of 2021. The 10-part series chronicles a 2,000-mile drive he and a colleague took using “The Green Book.” The guide listed motels, gas stations, restaurants, and other services that provided safe havens for Black motorists navigating often-perilous journeys through the South during segregation. 

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2021
August
09
Monday
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